Cruise Elroy

At the risk of turning this site into the Brainy Gamer Revue, I’m going to play around a bit with Michael Abbott’s “gaming tripod” theory discussed in this post and this podcast.

Michael outlines three broad categories of games that are currently “supporting” the industry, like the legs of a tripod: games that favor narrative elements, like Grand Theft Auto IV; games that favor ludic elements, like Mario Kart Wii; and ultra-accessible “lifestyle” games such as the upcoming Wii Fit (which doesn’t have a snappy term yet, as far as I know).

It’s an instructive metaphor, and I think that it can be taken even further. First, though, I want to talk about a fourth category of games that’s been getting attention recently, which I’ll call self-reflexive games.

Self-reflexive games are aware of their status as video games. They obliquely reference other titles, ironize the conventions of their genres, and riff on the culture that surrounds the industry. Like a jazz solo that quotes an old standard or a novel that satirizes a particular author’s style, self-reflexive games require a smart audience to get the references and fully appreciate their design. In short, they’re games made for gamers, and their existence is a reflection of the medium’s maturation.

The idea of self-reflexive games goes back to 1995 (at least) with EarthBound, still one of the best video game sendups I’ve seen.¹ While it’s absolutely hilarious, it’s also impossible to explain to people who don’t play games. More recently there’s No More Heroes, which irreverently juxtaposes two decades of gaming aesthetics (according to my reading of it, at least). There’s also the recent crop of indie games, such as Kian Bashiri’s You Have to Burn the Rope, that have played upon gaming conventions in a humorously referential way.²

So what does this self-reflexive category have to do with anything? If we graft it onto the categories that Michael came up with, we can create two continua which are useful for describing how video games work.

The first continuum has ludic elements on one and and narrative elements on the other, and measures a game’s dependence on storytelling. This is a familiar dichotomy to those who have studied games. Way at the ludic end might be a game like Tetris — no story, no characters, just pure unadulterated play. Way at the narrative end would be something like Shenmue, a game that can have its interactivity removed and lose almost nothing in the process. Other games, like Michael’s Mario Kart Wii and Grand Theft Auto IV suggestions, fall somewhere between those extremes.

The other continuum measures how “video-gamey” the game is. I think of the two ends of this one as “accessibility” and “self-reflexivity,” which are perhaps not ideal terms, but they’ll do for now. Way at the accessibility extreme are titles like Wii Fit and Brain Age, which use the language of video games but otherwise barely qualify as such. Next to them are games like Wii Play and Mario Party, which are more traditionally “video-gamey” but don’t require a deep familiarity with the medium to enjoy. Moving down the line we encounter genres that are increasingly built upon gaming expertise: real-time strategy games, tactical RPGs, 4X games, MMORPGs.³ Finally, on the self-reflexivity end is your No More Heroes and You Have to Burn the Rope. For these titles, the mechanics aren’t the issue — their very appeal is limited to those steeped in the culture.

One of the neat things about thinking of games this way is that it places them in a greater context. One can almost imagine the definition of “game” distorting at the edges of the graph. Go too far past Shenmue in the “narrative” direction, and you end up with a plain old movie; go too far towards “accessibility,” and you end up passing Wii Fit and finding…well, real life. It’s no wonder we’ve had trouble defining video games.

As you can probably tell, I’m still working this theory out. I’d love to hear your feedback.

1. If you’d like to give it a try, EarthBound is likely coming to the Wii Virtual Console soon.
2. For further reading on these games, I recommend Tim Rogers on EarthBound (known as Mother 2 in Japan), Schlaghund on No More Heroes, and IndieGames’s interview with the creator of You Have to Burn the Rope.
3. It seems that generally speaking, the more bizarre or unwieldy the acronym, the less accessible the genre. Funny how that works out.

Just as the discussion over the Resident Evil 5 trailer was winding down, Grand Theft Auto IV has helpfully provided us with a new controversy to froth over. While the GTA series has long been a lightning rod for video game critics, this time the controversy is coming from an unexpected source: IGN.

According to MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo, a video montage posted to the popular gaming site this week “exclusively featured clips of the game’s lead character having sex and shooting the women he had sex with.” After receiving a number of complaints, IGN decided they had “crossed a line” and removed the video.

Not everyone was upset at IGN. Much of the mainstream media, like the Boston Globe, was happy taking the game to task on its own merits; some bloggers, like Man Bytes Blog’s Corvus Elrod and Feministing’s Samhita Mukhopadhyay were more concerned with why something like Grand Theft Auto IV is popular at all. Susannah Breslin at The Reverse Cowgirl actually thought the video was funny.

On the gaming blogs I follow, though, the most common reaction was unbridled fury. Here’s Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer:

Removing the video and saying you “crossed a line” is a woefully inadequate response. You need to issue a formal public apology, and the people responsible for creating and posting this video must be held accountable. Jack Thompson is the least of your worries. You need to answer to us, the gamer community, many of whom resent the self-inflicted black eye you just gave us.

And here’s a more colorful response from Leigh Alexander of Sexy Videogameland:

What the fuck were you guys thinking? Do you really think so little of your audience? Worse, do you really think so little of the industry?

[...]

Lots of us really, really care about treating games and gamers with respect, and it’s like you just spit in our face. Are you really as stupid as this makes you look, or do you just totally not give a shit? Are you that desperate for traffic, or were you just angling to set up a new “horrors of GTA” story for your Fox parent? I completely cannot understand this.

Me either, to be honest. It was one thing for random commenters to spew ignorance and stupidity during the Resident Evil 5 trailer controversy, but having a community nexus like IGN reinforce negative gamer stereotypes seems almost like an act of betrayal. It helps undo the intelligent critical discussion that we foster on our blogs, and it cripples the public discourse about games. So yes, I can certainly sympathize, and I’m personally quite disappointed in IGN.

At the same time, though, I’m not convinced that they did anything “wrong,” in a moral or ethical sense.

The underlying assumption of these arguments is that IGN’s video montage somehow misrepresented the game. Here’s Michael again, elaborating in a later post:

Of course it’s possible to do all the things the video depicts while playing GTA4. It’s possible to do all sorts of ugly things in all sorts of media, as well as in real life. The fact that it’s possible doesn’t make it acceptable to do what IGN did. If you want to play GTA4 at home and kill as many prostitutes as you can, that’s your decision. It’s another thing entirely to make a compilation video featuring one killing after another, set to music, and post it on your website that receives over 20 million unique visitors per month.

While I share some of Michael’s outrage, I don’t think the “it’s possible to do all sorts of ugly things” argument holds up because of the nature of the video game medium.

Even in the most open-ended titles, you can never do “anything” you want; the game designers make the rules, and they get to determine which actions your character is capable of. In Oblivion you can wield a sword and be a great warrior, but you can’t wield a lute and be a great troubadour. In Shenmue you can go to the Suzuki dojo and practice martial arts, but you can’t go to Nozomi’s shop and practice floral arrangement. Infinite choice is not just unfeasible for the designer but paralyzing for the player; in a way, video games are defined by what you can’t do in them.

Let’s revisit Corvus’s post, which posits a list of questions about sex in GTA IV:

Do i have the option of using a condom?

Do they, or you, run the risk of contracting a venereal diseases?

Or AIDS?

Could I take a prostitute out to dinner at a nice restaurant?

Or pay for her to go to school?

Could I help her kick her drug habit? [And so on.]

I haven’t played GTA IV yet, but I have a pretty good idea about the answers to those questions.

The fact is, Rockstar specifically chose to include the option to have sex with prostitutes and kill them, as opposed to the infinite other mechanics they could have chosen instead (and the “balancing” mechanics that Corvus is suggesting). Whether it’s the whole game, or even a major or necessary part of it, is irrelevant — the inclusion itself reveals what sort of game they were trying to create. (I’m sure I don’t need to point out that you couldn’t hire prostitutes in Oblivion and Shenmue.)

So although Michael is right that the player ultimately decides to, say, kill as many prostitutes as she can, that choice is directly enabled by the game’s design. IGN’s video may have been sensationalist nonsense, but I’m having a hard time seeing it as misrepresentative, disingenuous, or unethical.

I started No More Heroes over the weekend. There’s not much to add to the excellent critiques from Leigh Alexander, Michael Abbott, and Steve Gaynor — among others — but I thought I’d offer up my first impressions anyway.

In a word, it’s hilarious. The essays I linked above all talked about how No More Heroes is a gamer’s game, chock full of inside jokes and self-parody, and they’re spot on. I especially love how it simultaneously references new and old video games: the pixelated graphical interface superimposed on the Grand Theft Auto-like city, the 8-bit sound effects with the modern J-Pop soundtrack, the 3D cel-shaded boss fights giving way to a 1980s arcade-style high score board. It grabs disparate elements and recombines them in a postmodern mash-up, sending it all up but also paying tribute in a great gaming roast. It’s like a gruesome, black-humored EarthBound, and I love it.

You play the ludicrously named Travis Touchdown, who hails from the equally ludicrously named Santa Destroy. Travis is a shiftless game- and porn-addicted otaku who decides to become the best professional assassin in the world on the offhand suggestion of a girl he doesn’t know. And that’s probably the least absurd part of the game.

Travis fights with a “beam sword,” a battery-powered weapon that seems to be a cross between a lightsaber and a fluorescent light bulb, but it’s clear from the beginning that there will be no sterilized Star Wars swordfighting. In the intro cinematic, Travis crashes through the gate of a mansion on his giant motorbike, soars through the air, and messily decapitates the guards while yelling “Fuckhead!” over a screaming distorted guitar riff. The game never looks back from there.

Designer Goichi “Suda51″ Suda had the stated intention of making No More Heroes more violent than the grisly Manhunt 2, but the fetishization of violence here is so cartoonish and over the top that it crosses over into comedy. The amount of blood that spouts from fallen enemies makes Mortal Kombat’s fatalities look like paper cuts. Amusingly, the enemies also spew gold coins from their wounds, which pour right into Travis’ pockets in a parodic simplification of the grinding process.

Even more telling is the game’s conflation of violence with sex. There’s Silvia Christel, the femme fatale who gets Travis into the assassination game in the first place, hypersexualized as per the long tradition of female game characters.

But then there’s Travis’ weapon.

The jaded English major in me rolls his eyes whenever some random cylindrical object is designated “phallic,” but even I have to concede this one: When the beam sword runs out of energy, the player mimics masturbation with the Wii remote to recharge it, and Travis responds by sticking the beam sword between his legs and literally jerking it up and down. No More Heroes bluntly reminds us that for all the artistic pretensions of video games, present company included, in the end we’re just fucking around.

So far I’ve had a lot of fun with No More Heroes, although I worry that a lot of my enjoyment doesn’t stem directly from the gameplay. Hopefully its thematic strength is enough to overcome the admittedly repetitive mechanics and niggling problems so I can see it through to the end.

When I was ten years old my VideoGames magazine subscription was suddenly replaced with Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was, as I recall, sudden and unexplained — one month VideoGames simply didn’t come, and EGM took over as though nothing had happened.¹ I distinctly remember it happening, too; the first issue I got was #89, and Street Fighter III was the cover story. Immediately I fell in love, and for years I read EGM religiously.

My favorite reviewer back then was was Dan “Shoe” Hsu. I’ve tried to keep up with his work over the years through 1UP, and have been happy to see that he’s been quite successful; he’s worked his way up from associate editor to editor-in-chief. I was therefore a bit shocked to see the Kotaku post last week about him stepping down.

On some level, it’s a personal thing — this is a guy who I’ve been reading for literally half of my life, and now he’s gone. (For now, anyway.) But it got me thinking about something.

With all the thousands of bloggers, reviewers, and journalists that cover video games, it’s hard to find a gaming personality with a truly far-reaching influence. Shoe was a popular and well-respected reviewer, but I wouldn’t call him famous, even in the gaming community. Who, I started to wonder, is our Roger Ebert — our universally known and widely respected critic whose very popularity demands that we dialogue with his opinions? Who is our tastemaker?

The first person that came to mind was Jerry “Tycho” Holkins, the writer behind the comic strip Penny Arcade. By the estimation of Holkins and his cohort Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, they have a readership of three million, so the “universally known” criterion is certainly met. But what about the critical role?

Every Penny Arcade strip is accompanied by a long screed from Holkins, which covers the gaming news du jour with his trademark wryness and prolixity. Over time, this has become just as much of a draw as the strip itself; it’s telling that the home page actually displays the latest news post and not the latest comic.

While Holkins’ posts are entertaining and insightful, one side effect of Penny Arcade’s popularity is that he’s become increasingly reflexive. We still get discussion about video games, to be sure, but it’s hidden among personal anecdotes, reports from conventions, and other stories from the lives of the PA crew. Add in announcements of new merchandise, updates on the annual expo they host in Seattle, and news about their charity, and Penny Arcade is as much about Penny Arcade as anything else. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that — I just think Holkins and Krahulik are best understood as gaming celebrities, not as critics.

After thinking about it some more, I’ve decided that the real tastemaker is Ben Croshaw.

Croshaw, who goes by the name “Yahtzee,” is the man behind the Zero Punctuation video reviews. “Review” is probably too kind a word, actually; they’re usually more like eviscerations. The quick-witted Croshaw uses his biting sarcasm to ridicule games — even ones that he likes — while speaking at top speed over subtle visual gags. It’s a lot like watching His Girl Friday — you have to force yourself not to laugh too hard if you don’t want to miss the next three jokes.

Like Penny Arcade, Zero Punctuation strikes that balance between erudition and vulgarity which seems to ignite the community. The Escapist first picked up the series in July of last year, and since then their traffic has quadrupled. The videos average over a million views apiece, get hundreds of comments, and are discussed across the blogosphere. The television network G4 is even getting in on the action. In short, Zero Punctuation’s popularity and influence have already hit critical mass, and they’re still growing.

Give him another year or two, and Yahtzee might be the most important critic in the industry.

1. As it turns out, Ziff-Davis bought VideoGames from Larry Flynt Publications and then folded the brand.

While I’ve been blathering on about Zelda music, MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John has been posting a series of fascinating interviews with black professionals in games. The interviews cover a broad range of topics, from affirmative action to industry discrimination to the presentation of blacks in video games themselves, and I highly recommend them.

There’s one post in particular that I need to talk about, though, and that’s the one with Newsweek journalist N’Gai Croal’s thoughts on the trailer for Resident Evil 5. (We’re going to get a little NSFW from here on out; you have been warned.)

You can watch the trailer here. It features protagonist Chris Redfield gunning down an African village full of zombies.

I’ve excerpted some of Croal’s argument below, though I strongly encourage you to read the whole post to put it in context.

I looked at the “Resident Evil 5″ trailer and I was like, “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.” Because I wonder, and I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much, but I wonder what sort of advice Capcom gave them. The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery.

There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There [sic] sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed.

[...]

It’s like when you engage that kind of imagery you have to be careful with it. It would be like saying you were going to do some sort of zombie movie that appeared to be set in Europe in the 1940’s with skinny, emaciated, Hasidic-looking people. If you put up that imagery people would be saying, “Are you crazy?” Well, that’s what this stuff looks like. This imagery has a history. It has a history and you can’t pretend otherwise. That imagery still has a history that has to be engaged, that has to be understood.

Now, Croal is a smart guy, as fans of his blog Level Up are aware. I’m sure he was fully aware that his comments would ruffle the feathers of Resident Evil fans. (That, at least, explains the abundance of weasel words — “I haven’t sort of really dug into it that much,” “sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance,” etc.) But the cards are stacked against him from the beginning because he has the audacity to try to make a nuanced point.

If you read his argument carefully — and I again encourage you to look at the whole thing — it’s obvious that his beef is not with Capcom, or even with Resident Evil 5. He’s specifically concerned with the trailer’s usage of a particular kind of imagery (racial othering) as seen through the lens of a particular discipline (postmodernism). He also clearly doesn’t want to stop the game from being released; he is suggesting that more care ought to be taken with its use of racially charged images. In short, it’s not the kind of argument that can be easily distilled.

Naturally, that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. Here are a couple of comments from the discussion of Croal’s comments on Joystiq.

“xFenixKnightx”:

Im so pumped for this game and if they ban it or something I will be pissed. I already didnt liek N’gay Troll and now he wants to do this to me =(

“KurtM”:

This is so gay. No one is going to buy this game for the sole purpose of offin’ some brothers…even if they did who cares? Its not like the rest of us are. Those same people will go around killing black random people in GTA IV, or any other game allowing such play. The rest of us just want a bad ass game thats fun to play. If its set in Africa, who gives a damn? The main character has been around and was already white. No matter what color he is people will always have a problem. game on, bitches.

And here’s a couple from Kotaku’s 1000+ comment snafu.

“naught”:

This is PC bullshite. By throwing a fit and claiming that black people should be treated different than white people, YOU are perpetuating racism, N’Gai. Disagree? Try looking up the definition of racism first. Heck, I’ll do it for you:

“a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.”

Sorry, N’Gai, you’re racist.

If the people in the game were white, there would be NO discussion.

“Zenocide”:

N’Gai Croal = Whining punk bitch.

Sorry we cant kill white zombies exclusively Mr.Croal. Do we really have to cater to this generation of black people just because white cops hosed down their great grandparents during the Civil Rights movement?

Well, that about speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

To be fair, there are a few intelligent, well-reasoned comments here and there. But there are many, many more that are as bad as, or worse than, the ones I’ve selected. Kotaku editor Brian Crecente even took the opportunity to reflect on the viability of his site’s commenting policy. So what’s going on?

I think there are two issues. The first is something Penny Arcade famously described in the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory — that anonymity encourages poor behavior. On the Internet, when someone’s gut reaction is pure, sputtering anger, he usually has no incentive to filter himself.¹ The upshot is that the level of discourse takes a nose dive as discussion devolves into name-calling and ad hominem attacks. (Joystiq and Kotaku are partially at fault here too; they both quoted Croal out of context with the sensationalist headline “Clearly No One Black Worked On This Game.” In hindsight, that was not the way to kick-start a debate.)

The second issue, and the more important one in my view, is something common to all video game fans — our need to justify our pastime. With games under near-constant attack from the media and government, we tend to be unduly suspicious of anyone with a critical agenda. Claims of racism, sexism, indecency, violence, or game addiction are shrilly decried by the gaming community for fear of censorship. In other words, I don’t think the Joystiq and Kotaku commenters care what Croal’s opinion of Resident Evil 5 is on a personal level; they’re just worried that his public criticism will somehow affect their ability to enjoy it.

That, I think, is the wrong approach to take. Video games are not yet at the point of widespread acceptance — gamers are still thought of as a distinct subculture in a way that, say, moviegoers are not — and intelligent discussion from mainstream journalists like Croal helps elevate the medium beyond its current marginalized status. By shouting down any and all criticism, especially using the tone that many of the Kotaku and Joystiq commenters adopted, we present an ugly face for the gaming community that confirms the worst of society’s stereotypes.

1. There’s a ton more to be said on this topic, but it’s beyond the scope of this blog. For more on creating accountability in online communities, I recommend the recent post “Can $5 Improve Reader Comments?” from the Freakonomics blog. (Be sure to scroll down and read the comments.)

By any objective standard Twilight Princess seems head and shoulders above Ocarina of Time. The dungeon design has improved, the battles require more strategy, the world is bigger, the plot is deeper…I could go on, but I suspect many of you have played or read about it by now. Suffice it to say that Twilight Princess is an incredibly ambitious title that improves upon Ocarina in nearly every area.

So why am I loath to say that it’s a better game?

I have a theory, but first allow me to make a somewhat labored analogy between the Zelda and Mario games. If we distill the series into just their most groundbreaking titles,¹ they follow similar trajectories.

The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. are the seminal titles, and they establish the basic mechanics for future games to expand upon. Though simplistic by today’s standards, they’re still fun and eminently playable. Both are universally considered classics of the medium.

A Link to the Past and Super Mario Bros. 3 are similarly analogous. They’ve fleshed out and refined the gameplay elements of their predecessors; now Link can visit full-fledged towns instead of random old men hiding in caves, and now Mario has more items and an overworld instead of just a Fire Flower and series of barely connected levels. Both games represent the pinnacle of 2D gaming in their respective genres and, once again, are hailed today as classics.

Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 defined their series in the 3D realm, with new controls and revamped gameplay, and both enjoy widespread acclaim for their genre-defining innovations. The analogy begins to break down a bit here; while Super Mario 64 was quite well-received, you’d be hard pressed to get a consensus that it’s the greatest Mario game ever.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to overstate how well-received Ocarina was. Despite a staggering amount of prerelease coverage and speculation that it could never live up to the hype, critics and fans both adored the game. It seemed to get more perfect scores than non-perfect ones, and it still routinely lands near the top of those ubiquitous Best x Games of All Time lists. Rarely in the history of the industry has a title been anticipated so highly and still exceeded expectations to the degree Ocarina of Time did.

Now we have Super Mario Galaxy, which has gotten widespread critical acclaim, as is to be expected by now. One could make a case for including it on this list of groundbreaking Mario titles with its motion controls, asymmetrical two-player mode, and physics-defying gravity. But what news from the Zelda front?

They’ve certainly been busy. After the seven-year gap between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time, Nintendo cranked out three console Zelda titles in five years, including Majora’s Mask and The Wind Waker. These games have been critical successes and fan favorites, but none have been the post-Ocarina phenomenon Nintendo has been looking for.

Enter Twilight Princess, a game explicitly promoted as the best Zelda ever.

During development, Nintendo Power magazine interviewed several people working on the game for their “Inside Zelda” feature. Nearly all of them mention Ocarina of Time as the benchmark for success, which assistant director Makoto Miyanaga picked up on in one of the articles:

You’ve heard from many people on the team that we’re under great expectations to exceed Ocarina of Time. I see Twilight Princess’s development from a privileged perspective, since I work with many teams almost every day. So I’m in a unique position to see how the pressure from Ocarina translates for different people: sometimes good, sometimes not so good. For example, there’s a feeling that we absolutely can’t “lose” to Ocarina. And that creates a lot of pressure.

So how did they do? Incredibly well, actually — it’s a great game, and fully deserves the accolades it’s received. As I said in the introduction, it improves on Ocarina in nearly every way.²

Unfortunately, that’s also Twilight Princess’s biggest fault — that it improves upon Ocarina in nearly every way. After ten years, I don’t really want that; I want a revolution. I want something analogous to the jump from The Legend of Zelda to A Link to the Past. I want a Super Mario Galaxy — something to take the series to the next level.

Instead, what I got in Twilight Princess is a refinement of the same formula that’s powered the Zelda games since the Nintendo 64. Is it the best Zelda ever? Maybe if you look at it out of context. Ultimately, though, it’s just another iteration — not a bad one by any means, but an essentially familiar experience. That’s why Twilight Princess “loses” to Ocarina despite Makoto Miyanaga’s best efforts.

I’m reminded of the quote I mentioned in “Bridge games” where Shigeru Miyamoto says Twilight Princess will be, “without a doubt, the last Zelda game as you know it in its present form.” If the series is to continue, we badly need that to be true.

1. I’ll probably raise the ire of Mario and Zelda fans with this sort of cherry-picking. All I’ll say is that I’m focusing on what I see as the truly revolutionary titles — ones that significantly changed and improved upon the core gameplay. I have nothing against games like Majora’s Mask or the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, but they are pretty closely derived from their immediate predecessors.
2. There are actually some things that I think Ocarina does better, but that’s a post for another day.

On my earlier Brawl post, commenter “Misha from Mefi” says she’s been having trouble buying Wii games:

We based our choices on game ratings, but it seems we lack the shared experiences of the Nintendo crowd and so, for example, Super Mario Galaxy has been a huge disappointment. We cannot fathom why in the world the game was so popular and had such great reviews and can only attribute it to Nintendo Fanboy mindset.

To put this in perspective, we haven’t had the same experience at all with our PS3; all the games that came highly reviewed met or exceeded our expectations, as did Bioshock and Halo 3 (among others) for the Xbox 360.

But Nintendo devotees seem to have a much stronger connection to their favorites that transcends simple gameplay and causes them to embrace any vehicle which showcases their favorite characters, which I think has led to some pretty poor games as a sad side effect, like the “party” or “race” games that are just a bunch of cartoon characters thrown into very basic game play.

Now, we could argue specifics here; I don’t consider myself a Nintendo fanboy, but I happen to think Galaxy is one of the best games I’ve played in years, and I enjoy the Mario Kart series.¹ But Misha’s comment raises an important question: what role, exactly, does our video game heritage play in assessing new games?

One of my professors was recently given a Wii, and he asked me if I thought Super Mario Galaxy was a good game. I told him it was. “Why?” he asked.

I was momentarily stumped. How could I describe Galaxy’s appeal to a non-gamer without resorting to boilerplate praise like “it’s fun” and “it looks nice”?

I ended up giving a brief summary of the Mario series — its thematic focus on exploration, the transition from 2D to 3D — and an explanation of how Galaxy enhances and expands on its predecessors. But is that sufficient? What does someone unfamiliar with the series take away from an explanation like that?

In other words, did I tell my professor why Galaxy is a good game, or why it’s a Mario game?

For some people this isn’t just an intellectual exercise. In a recent column for GameSetWatch, games journalist Leigh Alexander discussed the difficulty of dealing with “fanboyism” as a reviewer. She believes, as I do, that much of Super Smash Bros. Brawl’s appeal lies in the player’s familiarity with the characters. How, then, can we reconcile our collective Nintendo upbringing with our desire for an objective review?

Her answer? We shouldn’t bother.

If a reviewer’s positive experience of a game is influenced by its familiar franchise elements, it’s not a disqualification – it’s safe to say that most of the fans would experience that same influence. But for the sake of the industry’s future, the stamina of the developers (and please, the sanity of the journalists), let’s relinquish this idea that there is such a thing as “unbiased” for any single one of us, no matter how hard we try. I propose we embrace our own subjectivity, neutering fanboyism by accepting it — because it sure ain’t going anywhere.

In a way, Alexander came to the same realization that I did when trying to explain the appeal of Super Mario Galaxy to my professor: reviews are necessarily contextual, and trying to discuss a game in a vacuum is an exercise in futility. For professionals, the best we can hope for is full disclosure on the part of the reviewer. That way, we’ll know if the guy praising Mario Kart Wii is a lifelong Nintendo fan and perhaps take his opinion with a grain of salt.

Meanwhile, across the pond, British games journalist Kieron Gillen took Alexander to task on the PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun.² While he agrees with her general point, Gillen notes that European gamers of his generation didn’t have the Nintendo upbringing that most Americans did.

Without that residual affection, Mario and Link are things I have to get past to enjoy Nintendo games. As the Escapist noted, Mario’s pretty much unmarketable. If you don’t love him already, there’s no reason to. Why on Earth would you want to enter his world? He’s a borderline-racist plumber in a land of mushrooms. The reason why I do so is because of my reason overruling my gut, as I know the games are at the pinnacle of the genre and I want to experience that. So I grimace my way through the cut-scenes and get on with it.

While I eventually grew to love Nintendo’s franchise characters and games, Misha doesn’t find appeal in either, and Gillen plays the games in spite of his distaste for the characters. Who of of the three of us would you most trust to review a Nintendo game? Would your opinion change based on your own past gaming experiences?

It’s a complex issue, and I don’t know that there’s a neat conclusion to be drawn. I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the Escapist piece on Mario that Gillen linked:

Without the established history of the character, Nintendo would be hard pressed to find the same degree of success if Mario was launched in the modern era. But those same elements of Mario’s design that would limit him commercially as a new IP are what sustain him as an existing character; his evolution, unlike Sonic’s, has been about lateral expansion. And while nostalgia plays a big role in maintaining his relevance, it’s the creative license and quality gameplay that cement the character as an irreplaceable piece of modern gaming.

1. The Mario Party games are pretty dumb, though. Penny Arcade’s profane rant is a good dismantling of the series.
2. I should point out that Gillen’s argument against Alexander is incidental to a greater point he’s making about a new freeware game, ROM Check Fail. It’s an interesting title, and I’ll likely have more to say about it soon.

Given the posts so far on Cruise Elroy you might think I’m a lifelong dyed-in-the-wool Nintendo fan, but I actually grew up on Sega consoles (and PC shareware, but that’s a post for another day). For years I was a huge Sonic the Hedgehog fan, and I want to see if I can collect my thoughts on the series.

Much to my chagrin, there hasn’t been a smash hit Sonic game in over a decade. Remember when the 16-bit Sonic games stood toe-to-toe with the likes of Super Mario World and put the Genesis on the map? Those days are long gone. What happened?

My theory is that, more than the weak plots and the proliferation of questionable characters, the series has faltered because Sega hasn’t been able to keep running interesting.

In “The Experimental Gameplay Project,” I offered the opinion that many of the best video games are based around a single gameplay mechanic. In Super Mario Bros., that mechanic is jumping. You jump on Koopas and Goombas, you jump to knock powerups out of floating bricks, you jump to dodge Piranha Plants and Bullet Bills, and you jump to get from one platform to the next. Before Mario had a name, he was even called Jumpman.

In Sonic the Hedgehog, the central mechanic is running. You run through fields, ruins, and factories. You run down slopes and around loop-the-loops. You bounce off springs to send you running even faster. If enemies are in your way, you can switch from running to rolling with the press of a button and continue unhindered. Levels are designed so that you can tear through them at top speed.

In two dimensions, running is great. One of my first “wow” moments as a gamer was outrunning the scrolling background in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. When Sega got to Sonic Adventure, though, they ran into trouble.

“Go fast,” it turns out, is not a mechanic that works well in three dimensions. 3D environments are exponentially more complex than 2D ones; you can set off in any direction, and the level needs to either provide lots of things for you to do or inhibit your freedom to go wherever you want. Running requires an obvious direction to go in, so most levels in Sonic Adventure opt for the latter and are functionally two-dimensional. In other words, Sonic is in a polygonal world, but the design is such that there are still only two directions to go in — forward and backward.

This is problematic for two reasons. First, it makes the transition to 3D seem like a ruse. (Where’s the revolutionary next-generation gameplay?) Second, it forces the player to realize that the much of the game boils down to “hold forward on the D-pad.” It’s a disillusioning thought, but perhaps the series is based on a fundamentally flawed mechanic.

As if to preempt that realization, Sonic Adventure’s other characters have radically different gameplay: Big the Cat fishes, E-102 Gamma shoots, Knuckles looks for stuff. They weren’t bad, but they were far removed from the lightning speed that defines the series.

Now Sega seems to have lost direction with a slew of mediocre releases like Sonic Rivals and Shadow the Hedgehog. There’s a Sonic RPG in the pipeline called Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood; meanwhile, the main series’ future rests on the upcoming Sonic Unleashed, which features the ability to (gulp) transform into a werewolf.

Is it possible to create a smash hit 3D Sonic game? I don’t know, but I am pretty sure that the series won’t be revitalized with werewolves and RPGs, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best-received games of the past few years have been traditional side-scrollers like Sonic Advance. I’d be curious to hear others’ input on this, since my love of the early Genesis games may be clouding my judgement. Where can Sonic go from here?

While shopping at Target, Kevin Allen Jr. noticed something strange about a rack of t-shirts: each one had an cardboard CD case attached. Closer inspection revealed that the CDs were actually short video games from the Experimental Gameplay Project — a challenge to prototype an original game idea in less than a week.

The games are all pretty interesting sounding. Not your usual game content, for example there is a game where you’re a little dude with a gigantic head (like, your head has gravity and that effects play) trying to grow a dozen roses so you can attract the attention of a girl with a gigantic head. Or you are a robot spider in some uncertain distant desert future that has to traverse a dangerous landscape all while keeping your egg sac safe for future generations. The games get variously more abstract from there.

These are the rules of the Experimental Gameplay Project, as listed on the website:

1. Each game must be made in less than seven days,
2. Each game must be made by exactly one person,
3. Each game must be based around a common theme i.e. “gravity”, “vegetation”, “swarms”, etc.

The first two rules seem designed to create a creative frenzy akin to NaNoWriMo or the RPM Challenge, which thrive on the panic created by a looming deadline. This state is perhaps responsible for the bizarreness of the prototypes.

The third rule, though, really strikes at the core of game design. Many of the video game canon’s most beloved titles are built on simple mechanics. Isn’t Super Mario Bros. really just based around jumping? Isn’t Portal really just based around, well, portals? With so many developers intent on tossing in the kitchen sink, it’s refreshing to see games that strip away the extraneous nonsense and go back to basics. That focus, combined with the original gameplay ideas that the project encourages, are what make small independent games like these exciting.

In closing, Allen provides another nice perspective on the casual/hardcore/bridge trichotomy I wrote about yesterday:

These games are short, they play in the time it takes to watch a tv show or a youtube video, not an epic mini series. These are games for people who like games but don’t have the interest to invest 40+ hours of their lives in cinematic immersion. At the same time this is an informed audience. They are aware of the big games out there. I would imagine most of these folks probably have a “gamer” buddy who they play with once in a while, who informs their opinions about games. These more serious players buy and try the products in the game software aisles. The games that make the cut get filtered down to your casual crowd, our t-shirt buyers. These games are about pure fun.

(Hat tip to Waxy for the link.)

The first link in yesterday’s big post went to a press release, “Super Smash Bros. Brawl Smashes Nintendo Sales Records.” Toward the bottom, Nintendo talked about their future plans:

Mario Kart Wii launches April 27 with the Wii Wheel™, which lets players drive their speedy karts with the intuitive feel of a wireless steering wheel. It’s another “bridge” game like Wii Sports™ that lets video game novices and veterans play and have fun together.

I had glossed over the term “bridge game”, but Patrick Klepek seized on it in a post on MTV Multiplayer.

A few weeks ago, “BioShock”’s Ken Levine called “Wii Bowling” “the ultimate gateway drug.”

But is it? Bridging casual and hardcore gamers implies each is approaching a game from opposite directions — but having fun on a common ground. That doesn’t mean the “novice” will ever end up crossing to the other side. “Gateway games” and “bridge games” may not be one and the same.

I can’t speak broadly, but my own experience bears out that Wii Sports is more of a bridge game than a gateway game. I’ve gotten a few of my non-gamer friends to try it and Wii Play, but they didn’t show any interest in, say, Super Mario Galaxy.

So far, the gameplay of “bridge games” falls on the simpler side. Could Nintendo make a “bridge game” out of “Pikmin”? And how would you make a more accessible version of “The Legend of Zelda” without scaring off the hardcore?

Do they need to?

I haven’t played Phantom Hourglass yet, but based on what I’ve read it walked the line between accessible and hardcore fairly well — although it did seem like some reviewers cut the game some slack because the controls were so innovative. I’ll have to play the game myself before forming an opinion on the feasibility of a “bridge” Zelda.

Right now it’s Klepek’s last question that has me scratching my head. Does Nintendo need to make their major franchises more accessible?

At first I was tempted to answer yes. We who are willing to spend dozens of hours plowing through an adventure game are an increasingly irrelevant slice of the pie. If Nintendo’s business strategy is to iterate on their major franchises, I thought, they’re going to need to cast a wider net and interest the more casual gamers.

After further reflection, though, I’ve changed my mind. I think the fact that Nintendo recognizes a casual/hardcore dichotomy at all bodes well for the serious gamer. Even with their quest for universal appeal, we’ll still have games like the casual Nintendogs on one side and the hardcore Metroid Prime 3 on the other. In other words, if there are bridge games, there has to be something on each side to connect. If Nintendo wants to put Mario Kart Wii in the middle for all of us to play together, I’m okay with that.

According to the Zeldapedia wiki, “Shigeru Miyamoto has stated that Twilight Princess will be ‘without a doubt, the last Zelda game as you know it in its present form.’ This indicates that the Zelda series may receive a major user interface overhaul in order to take proper advantage of Wii.”

I initially thought Miyamoto’s quote was a death knell for the Zelda series. It sounded like they were planning for some drastic, disfiguring change — perhaps in the name of accessibility — that would enrage the longtime fans. Now I’m a bit more optimistic that Zeldapedia is right.

(I really hope they are, too — it’d be awesome to integrate the tilt sensor and accelerometer like the swordfighting minigame in WarioWare: Smooth Moves.)